Better signals, better people decisions: key takeaways from the Assessio HR Science Summit 2026

In the opening session, Alex Tidgård, CPO at Jobylon, shared what more than five million candidate data points say about selection today. Candidates generally understand why a process includes a personality assessment, a skills test, or a case interview. Far fewer trust those methods to show what they can do. When employers add a short explanation of why each method is used, trust rises noticeably.

The pressure on candidates is growing. Applicants per job on Jobylon's platform are up around 43% since 2021, and processes are getting longer and more automated. Emilia Kristianssion, Global Head of Solutions at Assessio, pointed out that perceived fairness and measured fairness are different things. A validated method can have low adverse impact and still feel irrelevant to the person taking it. Contextualised personality assessments, which ask about behaviour at work, tend to earn more trust for exactly that reason.

The fix is to keep the validated methods and explain them on the career site, in candidate emails, and at each step of the process. Alex's business case was simple. Candidate experience is weak across the market, so even modest improvements set an employer apart, and a poor experience shrinks the candidate pool you'll need when the market turns.

Ciara Lakhani has spent more than two decades in people roles, from start-ups to large international companies. In conversation with Raluca Chifor, psychometrician at Assessio, she described the typical culture-fit interview: informal chats, different questions for different candidates, and feedback along the lines. Research links that approach to bias and groupthink, and it rarely tells you how someone will actually work.

Ciara's alternative is to identify the values that genuinely shape how work gets done and assess every candidate against them. That means structured interviews that ask about past behaviour, which is more predictive than hypotheticals, alongside validated assessments. A mismatch in work style, such as “move fast” against “always double-check”, does far more damage than a difference in social personality. Raluca added that fit can be supplementary, strengthening what a team already has, or complementary, adding something it lacks. Both are legitimate reasons to hire, and neither means “gets on with us”.

Values also have to survive past the offer letter. Ciara recommended reinforcing them during onboarding and being honest with candidates when some values are still aspirational. She has seen values-based hiring hold up through rapid growth, including at a company that grew from around 80 people to over 1,000 across 24 countries.

Benjamin de Boer, psychologist and learning agility expert at Assessio, opened with the question he hears most often: how do you hire for a job that doesn't exist yet? Part of the answer is learning agility, which Assessio measures across five dimensions: change agility, people agility, mental agility, results agility, and self-awareness.

Pia-Maria Thorén, Director of Agile People and author, argued that hiring learning-agile people is only half the job. Behaviour comes from the person and their environment, so the same employee will learn quickly in one organisation and stall in another. People learn by experimenting, and they won't experiment without psychological safety. Leaders build it by admitting mistakes, asking more questions than they answer, and welcoming healthy conflict over what Pia-Maria called artificial harmony, where everyone nods along while privately disagreeing. Rigid job boxes and career paths work against it.

Leaders set the pace. Benjamin noted that Assessio's research shows a leader's learning agility tends to cap that of their team. Pia-Maria's approach starts with awareness across the organisation, then training for leaders and HR, then coaching, because training alone rarely changes how people work once they're back at their desks.

Professor Adrian Furnham, one of the most widely published psychologists in organisational behaviour, joined Emma Engebretzen, HR Director at Assessio, to discuss what happens when normal personality traits are taken to extremes. Extraversion brings energy and confidence, and at the far end, impulsive risk-taking. Conscientiousness, which Adrian called the strongest predictor of success at work, can tip into perfectionism. The traits that make a leadership candidate impressive in an interview, such as confidence, articulacy, and charm, can also hide the biggest risk. He flagged extreme self-confidence and a lack of conscience as the markers to watch.

Adrian's advice was to run the psychometrics, then look harder. He asks three further questions about any leadership candidate: what their history of relationships looks like, how well their view of themselves matches the evidence, and how well they adapt. Multi-source data is the most underused signal. A manager sees output, colleagues see values and ability, and direct reports see the habits that only show up day to day, so 360 feedback catches what a single view misses. On cost, he pointed to how much it takes to remove a leader who's the wrong fit, estimating that around 40% of senior appointments derail.

His closing advice applies to every selection process: “Someone should have the responsibility of looking for things they don't want.”

Professor Kerstin Alfes of ESCP Business School and Jessica van Wingerden of Nyenrode Business University joined Emma for a round table on engagement. Both described it as connection: to the work, the team, and the organisation, with highly engaged people fully immersed in what they do. Research consistently links engagement to performance. Despite headlines about decline, Jessica said overall engagement levels have stayed broadly stable for the past two decades. What has changed is the context, with hybrid work, shorter tenures, and fewer chance conversations at the coffee machine.

The survey remains essential for insight, but neither guest would turn its score into a target. The organisations that move engagement treat the results as the start of a conversation. Line managers discuss them with their teams, HR turns the findings into policy and leadership development, and the C-suite commits real time and resources. Employees have a role too. Kerstin encouraged people to raise what's affecting their engagement without waiting for the next survey.

For remote and hybrid teams, Kerstin's first advice to leaders was to check their own proximity bias: who do you call first? Bringing new hires together in person at the start, even briefly, helps build a sense of belonging that's hard to create later.

The final session started with a familiar problem. Julia Åkerlund, who spent years in talent acquisition at large global organisations before joining Assessio, said HR rarely lacks data. It sits in the ATS, in assessment reports, in performance tools, and in people's heads. Before a recruitment starts, she wants to know what has made people successful in the role, what the team needs, and whether there's an internal successor, and that information is seldom in one place. Mikkel Lundø, CEO of Assessio, added that when the data is scattered, succession decisions often come down to who someone believes in.

Assessio Talent Suite, which we launched at the summit, brings hiring, performance, development, engagement, and compensation into one platform with one data foundation. Charline Bestard, Director of Product, showed how that works in practice. The expectations defined for a role become the profile used to assess candidates. Insights from recruitment carry into onboarding, so a manager can set objectives before the new hire's first day. When a strong senior performer is up for a leadership role, performance data shows what they've delivered and validated psychometrics show their leadership potential. AI supports the process throughout, for example by scanning large volumes of review comments to show HR where to act first, while leaving the decision with people and meeting the requirements of the EU AI Act.

Mikkel made a point that tied the day together. Psychometrics are most often used at hiring, but he sees their value grow afterwards, because the better we know someone, the more our own biases shape how we judge them.